Sandy Ratcliff
Alexandra "Sandy" Ratcliff (2nd October 1948 - 7th April 2019) is a former British actress who appeared as Sue Osman on EastEnders from the shows inception in February 1985 up until May 1989. From a very early age, she loved to make people laugh. At eleven, she began to make outrageous clothes, experimenting with fabrics and designs, becoming a real "Mod" of the Sixties. Her interest in clothes led to a job as a house model with a South Molton Street fashion firm, while she studied design and pattern-cutting part-time at the London College of Fashion. She later entered the world of fashion photography as a stylist - casting models, booking sets and props for magazine features, while still finding time to undertake modelling assignments herself. In 1971 she auditioned with 400 hopefuls and got the leading role in the film Family Life, written by David Mercer. Her moving portrayal of the schizophrenic Jan won her instant recognition as an actress, and Lord Snowdon later photographed her as a Sunday Times "Face of the Seventies." After a long relationship with a theatre director, she had her son, William. Sandy's extensive TV work has included leading guest roles in such popular series as Shoestring, Minder, Target, and Shelley. She has had major roles in a number of TV plays - A Story Without a Hero, The After Dinner Joke and Playthings (all BBC), Couples, Speech Day and Lana Cork in Cork and Bottle, all for Thames TV. She played Mimi in the Oxford Playhouse production of The Workshop, seen on tour and then at Hampstead Theatre Club and as a BBC Play for Today. She has also played Kay Mansfield in two series of the BBC Schools drama Going To Work. Her theatre work has included a season at the Liverpool Everyman in 1979/80, Lolly in Lucky Strike at the ICA Theatre in 1982, and 'The Shoplifter' in The Detective Story at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre in 1983. Sandy was particularly interested in the women's movement and in women as writers. Since 1982 she had been concentrating on productions on feminist issues. The year before her East End debut she took part in the Channel 4 series Pictures of Women, and also played the lead role of Maggie in the feminist film Doll's Eye. In the late 1970s, Sandy was a member of the rock groups Tropic Appetite and then Escalator, singing and playing the bass guitar, mainly at benefit concerts. She has written poetry and songs since she was a child, and her big ambitions were to finish the plays she was writing, and also to record an album of her songs. However, following her time on EastEnders, Sandy was battling a conflict with heroin addiction, which led to her being written out of the show in May 1989 after playing the role of Sue for five years. After leaving EastEnders she appeared in Maigret and in the BBC Two productions A Box Of Swan in 1990 and Men Of The Month in 1994. Since then she has retired from acting and in 2010 it was revealed that Sandy had retrained as a counsellor before she also retired from that occupation. A few years later in April 2019, Sandy passed away in her sleep. Category:EastEnders actors